“You shouldn’t be here,” Peter whispered.
“The hell with that,” Sara said quietly. “You think I’d miss this?”
The screen blazed with light. Encircled numbers, descending in sequence: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Then:
CARL LAEMMLE
PRESENTS
“DRACULA”
by BRAM STOKER
FROM THE PLAY ADAPTED BY
HAMILTON DEANE & JOHN L. BALDERSTON
A TOD BROWNING PRODUCTION
A chorus of cheers rose up from the benches as, incredibly, the screen was filled with the moving image of a horse-drawn carriage, racing along a mountain road. The picture was bleached of all color, composed entirely of tones of gray—the palette of a half-remembered dream.
“Dracs,” said Hollis. He turned to Peter, frowning. “Dracula?”
“Sound!” one of the soldiers bellowed, followed by others. “Sound! Sound!”
The soldier operating the projector was frantically checking connections, twisting knobs. He jogged briskly forward and knelt by a box positioned under the screen.
“Wait, there, I think that’s it—”
A crackling boom of static: Peter, entranced by the moving image on the screen—the carriage was entering a village now, people running to meet it—reflexively bolted in his chair. But then he realized what had occurred, what the box under the screen was. The clop of horses, the creak of the carriage on its springs and the voices of the villagers, speaking to one another in a strange language he had never heard before: the images were more than pictures, more than light. They were alive and breathing with sound.
On the screen, a man in a white hat waved a walking stick at the carriage man. As he opened his mouth to speak, all the soldiers chimed in as one:
“Don’t take my luggage down, I’m going on to Borgo Pass tonight!”
An explosion of general hilarity. Peter tore his gaze away to glance at Hollis. But his friend’s eyes, glowing with reflected light, were raptly focused on the moving images before them. He turned to Sara and Amy; they were the same.
On the screen, a heavyset man was speaking to the driver of the carriage, a burble of meaningless sounds. He returned to the first fellow, in the hat, his words amplified by the shouted recitation of the men:
“The driii-ver. He eez … afraid. Good fellow he eez. He wants me to ask if you can wait, and go on after sunrise.”
The first man waved his cane arrogantly, having none of it. “Well, I’m sorry, but there’s a carriage meeting me at Borgo Pass at midnight.”
“Borgo Pass? Whose carriage?”
“Why, Count Dracula’s.”
The mustached man’s eyes widened with terror. “Count … Dracula’s?”
“Don’t do it, Renfield!” one of the soldiers yelled, and everybody laughed.
It was a story, Peter realized. A story, like the old books in the Sanctuary, the ones Teacher read to them in circle, all those years ago. The people on the screen looked like they were pretending because they were; their exaggerated motions and expressions called to mind the way Teacher would act out the voices of the characters in the books she read. The heavy man with the mustache knew something that the man in the hat did not; there was danger ahead. Despite this warning, the traveler resumed his journey, to more mocking shouts from the soldiers. In darkness, the carriage ascended a mountain road, approaching a massive structure of turrets and walls, drenched in a forbidding moonlight. What lay ahead was obvious: the mustached man had more or less explained it. Vampires. An old word, but one Peter knew. He waited for the virals to appear, falling on the carriage and tearing the traveler to shreds, but this didn’t happen. The carriage pulled through the gate; the man, Renfield, stepped out to find that he was alone; the driver was gone. A creaking door, opening of its own accord, beckoned him inside, where he found himself in a great ruined cave of a room. Renfield, unaware, his innocence almost laughable, backed toward a massive flight of stairs, where a figure in a dark cloak, holding a single candle, was descending. As the cloaked figure reached the bottom, Renfield turned, the whites of his eyes expanding with such horror it was as if he’d stumbled on a whole pod of smokes, not a single man in a cape.
“I am … Drrrrrac-ulaaah.”
Another tent-shaking detonation of whoops, whistles, cheers. One of the soldiers in the front row shot to his feet.
“Hey, Count, eat this!”
A flash of spinning steel through the stream of light from the projector: the tip of the blade met the wood of the screen with a meaty thunk, burying itself squarely in the chest of the caped man, who seemed, surprisingly, to take no notice of this.
“Muncey, what the fuck!” the projector operator yelled.
“Get your blade,” someone else shouted, “it’s in the way!”
But the voices weren’t angry; everybody thought it was hilarious. Under a storm of catcalls, Muncey bounded to the screen, the images washing over him, to yank his blade free of the wood. He turned, grinning, and gave a little bow.
Despite it all—the chaotic interruptions, the laughter and mocking recitations of the soldiers, who anticipated every line—Peter soon found himself sliding into the story. He sensed that some pieces of the film were missing; the narrative leapt ahead in confusing jerks, leaving the castle behind for a ship at sea, then for a place called London. A city, he realized. A city from the Time Before. The Count—some kind of viral, though he didn’t look like one—was killing women. First a girl handing out flowers in the street, then a young woman asleep in her bed, with great sleepy curls of hair and a face so composed she looked like a doll. The Count’s movements were comically slow, as were his victim’s; everyone in the movie seemed trapped in a dream in which they couldn’t make themselves move fast enough, or even at all. Dracula himself possessed a pale, almost womanly face, his lips painted to look bowed, like the wings of a bat; whenever he was about to bite someone, the screen would hold for a long, lingering moment on his eyes, which were lit from below to glow like twin candle flames.
Part of Peter knew it was all fake, nothing to take seriously, and yet as the story continued, he found himself worried for the girl, Mina, the daughter of the doctor—Dr. Seward, owner of the sanatorium, whatever that was—and whose husband, the ineffectual Harker, seemed to have no idea how to help her, always standing around with his hands in his pockets, looking helpless and lost. None of them knew what to do, except for Van Helsing, the vampire hunter. He wasn’t like any hunter Peter had ever seen—an old man with thick, distorting eyeglasses, given to vast, windy pronouncements that were the object of the soldiers’ most outspoken mockery. “Gentlemen, we are dealing with the unthinkable!” and “The superstitions of tomorrow can become the scientific reality of today!” The catcalls flew each time, and yet a great deal of what Van Helsing said seemed true to Peter, especially the part about a vampire being “a creature whose life has been unnaturally prolonged.” If that didn’t describe a smoke, he didn’t know what did. He found himself wondering if Van Helsing’s trick with the jewelry-box mirror wasn’t some version of what had happened with the pans in Las Vegas, and if, as Van Helsing claimed, a vampire “must sleep each night in his native soil.” Was that why they always came home, the ones who’d been taken up? At times the movie seemed almost to be a kind of instruction manual. Peter wondered if it wasn’t a made-up tale at all but an account of something that had actually happened.
The girl, Mina, was taken up; Harker and Van Helsing pursued the vampire to his lair, a dank basement. Peter realized where the story was headed: they were going to perform the Mercy. They were going to hunt down Mina and kill her, and it was Harker, Mina’s husband, who would have to perform this terrible duty. Peter braced himself. The soldiers had finally grown quiet, their antics put aside as they were caught up, despite themselves, in the story’s final, grim unfolding.
He never got to see the end. A single soldier dashed into the tent.
“Lights up! Extraction at the gate!”
The movie was instantly forgotten; all the soldiers bolted from their chairs. Weapons were coming out, pistols, rifles, blades. In the rush to get to the door, someone tripped over the projector’s power cable, sinking the room into darkness. Everyone was pushing, shouting, calling out orders; Peter heard the pop of rifle fire from outside. As he followed the crowd from the tent, he saw a pair of flares rocketing over the walls toward the muddy field beyond the gate. Michael was running past him with Sancho; Peter seized him by the arm.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
Michael barely broke his stride. “It’s Blue Squad!” he said. “Come on!”
From the chaos of the mess hall had emerged a sudden orderliness; everyone knew what to do. The soldiers had broken into distinct groups, some quickly ascending the ladders to the catwalk at the tops of the pickets, others taking positions behind a barricade of sandbags just inside the gate. More men were swiveling the spotlights to aim them across the muddy field beyond the opening.
“Here they come!”
“Open it now!” Greer shouted from the base of the wall. “Open the goddamn gate!”
A deafening barrage of cover fire from the catwalk as half a dozen soldiers leapt into the space over the yard, holding the ropes that connected through a system of pulleys and blocks to the gate’s hinges. Peter was momentarily arrested by the coordinated grace of it all, the practiced beauty of their synchronized movements. As the soldiers descended, the gates began to part, revealing the light-bathed ground beyond the walls and a group of figures racing toward them. Alicia was leading the way. They hit the gate at a dead sprint, six of them, dropping and rolling in the dust as the men behind the sandbags opened fire, releasing a stream of rounds over their heads. If there were virals back there, Peter didn’t see any. It was all too fast, too loud, and then, just like that, it was over: the gates were sealed behind them.
Peter ran to where Alicia lay with the others. She was on all fours in the dirt, breathing hard; the paint was dripping down her face, her bald head shining like polished metal under the harsh glare of the spotlights.
As she rocked back onto her knees, their eyes met quickly. “Peter, get the hell out of here.”
From above, a few last halfhearted shots. The virals had scattered, retreating from the lights.
“I mean it,” she said fiercely. Every part of her seemed clenched. “Go.”
Others were crowding around. “Where’s Raimey?” Vorhees bellowed, moving through the men. “Where the hell’s Raimey?”
“He’s dead, sir.”
Vorhees turned to where Alicia was kneeling in the mud. When he saw Peter, his eyes flashed with anger. “Jaxon, you don’t belong here.”
“We found it, sir,” Alicia said. “Stumbled right into it. A regular hornet’s nest. There must be hundreds of them.”
Vorhees waved to Hollis and the others. “All of you, back to your quarters, now.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned back to Alicia. “Private Donadio, report.”
“The mine, General,” she said. “We found the mine.”
• • •
All that summer Vorhees’s men had been looking for it: the entrance shaft to an old copper mine, hidden somewhere in the hills. It was thought that this was one of the hot spots Vorhees had spoken of, a nest where the virals slept. Using old geological survey maps and tracking the creatures’ movements with the nets, they had narrowed their search to the southeast quadrant, an area of roughly twenty square kilometers above the river. Blue Squad’s mission had been one last attempt to locate it before the evac. It was sheer chance that they had; as Peter heard the story from Michael, Blue Squad had simply wandered into it, just before sundown—a soft depression in the earth, into which the point man had vanished with a scream. The first viral who emerged took two more men before anyone could get off a shot. The rest of the squad was able to form some kind of firing line, but more virals swarmed out, braving the last of daylight in their blood fury; once the sun went down, the unit would be quickly overwhelmed, the location of the mine shaft lost with them. The flares they carried would buy them a few minutes, but that was all. They broke into two groups; the first would make a run for it while the second, led by Lieutenant Raimey, would cover their escape, holding the creatures off as long as they could, until the sun went down and all the flares were gone, and that would be the end of it.
All night long, the camp buzzed with activity. Peter could feel the change: the days of waiting, of hunt-and-peck missions in the forest, were over; Vorhees’s men were preparing themselves for battle. Michael was gone, helping to ready the vehicles that would carry the explosives, drums of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate with a grenade-cluster igniter, known as a “flusher.” These would be lowered by winch straight into the exposed shaft. The explosion would no doubt kill many of the virals inside; the question was, where would the survivors emerge? In a hundred years the topography might have changed, and for all Vorhees and the others knew, a landslide or earthquake had opened an entirely new access point. While one squad put the explosives in place, the rest of the men would do their best to sniff out any other openings. With luck, everyone would be in position when the bomb went off.
The lights came down to a gray dawn. The temperature had dropped in the night, and all the puddles in the yard were encrusted with ice. The vehicles were being loaded; Vorhees’s soldiers were assembled at the gate, all but a single squad, which would stay behind to man the garrison. Alicia had spent many of the intervening hours in Vorhees’s tent. It was she who had led the survivors back to the garrison, using the route they had first traveled along the river. Now Peter saw her up front with the general, the two of them with a map spread over the hood of one of the Humvees. Greer, on horseback, was supervising the final loading of supplies. Watching from the sidelines, Peter felt a growing unease, but something else, too—a strong attractive force, instinctual as breathing. For days he had drifted between the poles of his uncertainty, knowing he should press on but unable to leave Alicia behind. Now, as he watched the soldiers completing their preparations at the gate, Alicia among them, a single desire pushed itself forward. Vorhees’s men were going to war; he wanted to be part of it.
As Greer moved down the line, Peter stepped forward. “Major, I’d like to speak with you.”
Greer’s face and voice were distracted, hasty. He looked over Peter’s head as he spoke: “What is it, Jaxon?”
“I’d like to go, sir.”
Greer regarded him a moment. “We can’t take civilians.”
“Just put me at the rear. There must be something I can do. I can, I don’t know, be a runner or something.”
Greer’s focus shifted to the back of one of the trucks, where a group of four men, including Michael, were winching the drums of fuel into place over the tailgate.
“Sergeant,” Greer barked to the squad sergeant, a man named Withers, “can you take over for me here? And Sancho, watch that chain—it’s all wrapped up.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“These are bombs, son. For Christsakes, be careful.” Then, to Peter: “Come with me.”
The major dismounted and took Peter aside, out of earshot. “I know you’re worried about her,” he said. “Okay? I get it. If it were up to me, I’d probably let you come.”
“Maybe if we talked to the general—”
“That’s not going to happen. I’m sorry.” A curious expression came into Greer’s face, a flickering indecision. “Look. What you told me about the girl, Amy. You should know something.” He shook his head, glancing away. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this. Maybe I really have been out in these woods too long. What’s that thing called? When you think something’s happened before, like you dreamed it. There’s a name for it.”
“Sir?”
Greer still wasn’t looking at him. “Déjà vu. That’s it. I’ve been feeling that way since I first found you guys. A big bad case of déjà vu. I know it doesn’t look li
ke it now, but when I was a kid, I was a scrawny little thing, sick all the time. My parents died when I was small, I never even really met them, so probably it was just the orphanage where I was raised, fifty kids all crammed together, all that snot and dirty hands. You name it, I caught it. About a dozen times the sisters were ready to write me off. Fever dreams like you wouldn’t believe, too. Nothing I could really describe, or even remember. Just the feeling of it, like being lost in the dark for a thousand years. But the thing was, I wasn’t alone. That was part of the dream, too. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, not until you all showed up. That girl. Those eyes of hers. You think I didn’t notice that? Jesus, it’s like I’m right back there, six years old and sweating my brains out with fever. I’m telling you, she was the one. I know it sounds crazy. She was in the dream with me.”
An expectant silence hung around his final words. Peter felt a shiver of recognition.
“Did you tell Vorhees this?”
“Are you kidding? What would I say? Hell, son, I’m not even telling you.”
To show Peter that the conversation was over, Greer took his mount by the reins and swung back up into the saddle. “That’s all. But you ask me why you can’t go, there’s my answer. We don’t come back, Red Squad has orders to evacuate you down to Roswell. That’s official. Unofficially, I will tell you they won’t stop you if you decide to press on.”
He heeled his mount to take his place at the head of the line. A roar of engines; the gates swung open. Peter watched as the men, five squads plus the horses and vehicles, moved slowly through. Alicia was somewhere in there, Peter thought, probably up front with Vorhees. But he couldn’t find her anywhere.
The line had long since passed when Michael came up beside him.
“He didn’t let you go, huh?”
Peter could only shake his head.
The Passage: A Novel Page 85
